21 Christmas travelers were killed in 1903 Kentwood train wreck

KENTWOOD — Caroline Sebring Eardley had sent the children to bed and was busy frying pancakes in the kitchen for dinner when she heard the whistle of the westbound locomotive.

It was the day after Christmas, Saturday, Dec. 26, 1903, and her husband was out helping one of their neighbors milk a cow when she peered out the window. Through the heavy evening snow, she could see the lights of another train, this one eastbound, as it neared her home.

Powerless to do anything, Eardley and neighbors watched in horror as the two locomotives smashed into each other with a deafening crunch of metal that killed 21 people and seriously injured 38 in a fiery mass of splintered timber and twisted steel.

“I had no phone and couldn’t leave the children,” Eardley recalled in an oral history recorded by the Kentwood Historical Commission in 1975.

“It was terrible — I remember the next day that there were Christmas presents scattered all over the tracks.”

The violent head-on collision 108 years ago today near the present-day intersection of 32th Street and Broadmoor Avenue, is the worst disaster in Grand Rapids railroad history and was the worst for Pere Marquette rail line at the time.

However, the story has become a mere footnote in history. No memorial marks the scene — a place only unique in the minds of a few locals who remember it happened at all.

“Progress has a way of mowing things down and a lot of this is just forgotten,” said Esther Middlewood, chair of the historical commission.

“It’s a shame because history makes us who we are.”

Newspaper reports dwelled on the gory details and heroic rescue efforts in the immediate aftermath of the crash, which occurred near the hamlet of East Paris, a tiny country village in eastern Paris Township, later to become the city of Kentwood.

“One trainman picked up a heavily booted foot and ankle. Five yards distant was found a hand so crushed and mangled that it fell apart when picked up,” read one particularly gruesome passage in the Grand Rapids Herald on Dec. 27.

The trains hit about 5:40 p.m. The westbound bound No. 5 train was traveling down grade about 60 mph, while the Detroit-bound No. 6 train was climbing the hill at about 40 miles mph. They slammed into each other in the middle of a long, sweeping curve.

The collision immediately reduced the baggage and smoking cars behind each locomotive to a pile of wood. One engine turned over and lay facing the opposite direction, the other climbed the wreckage, its boiler torn from the running gear and stood erect in the center of a heaping debris pile.

Between them, the trains carried 120 passengers total. The collision caused the instant death of 19. Two others died later.

Farmers living nearby rushed to the area and began pulling people from the debris. Passengers and crew from coach cars further back, shaken but unhurt, began to help. Rescuers carried lanterns to see in the blizzard’s darkness.

Word of the crash was broadcast by men who ran several miles to telegraph the line’s operations center, who had braced for the news after the station agent in McCords reported the westbound train missed a signal to stop, which had blown out in high wind.

A special train with surgeons and wrecking derricks was dispatched and Grand Rapids hospitals (and funeral directors) were put on alert. The rescue train did not make it back to the city until 5 a.m.

William T. Merigold, a traveling agent out of Chicago, was in the smoking car of the No. 6 train and miraculously escaped injury. “Right at my side were several men bleeding from awful wounds, and with the assistance of two other men I pulled two out,” he said.

Pere Marquette officials blamed the weather and a mix-up in orders for the accident. The No. 6 train was directed to meet the No. 5 at a different site, farther east than usual.

Running in heavy snow and darkness, the engineer on No. 5 blew past McCords, never seeing the stop signal, which the operator didn’t realize was blown out until too late. Dispatchers managed to phone a farmer nearby, but were not in time to flag down the eastbound train.

“We knew this was going to happen 10 minutes before it happened,” said assistant superintendent W. D. Trump. “There was no way to stop the train out of Grand Rapids.”

Still, the railroad was criticized in the days following the disaster, which was quickly forced from the front pages by the Dec. 30 burning of the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, the deadliest building fire in U.S. history, with at least 605 deaths.

Rev. George Eliot Cooley of All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Grand Rapids gave a sermon about the irresponsibility of men in the wake of the theatre fire and train wreck disasters.

“What we often call the inscrutable will of the Almighty is the result of man’s criminal carelessness,” he said. “The time must come, and that is not distant, when the people will not ask of a railroad if it is paying, but is it fitted to do well and safely the work of the world.”

The engineer of No. 5 survived the wreck, cleared his name following a coroner’s inquest, but later left his family and disappeared, still feeling the guilt. Today, the track is still in use, although the Pere Marquette company was folded into CSX Transportation long ago.

Middlewood said the site of the crash is one of several historic sites in Kentwood that she’d like to see honored by some kind of marker, but it’s hard to stir interest during a time of crunching budgets. The commission is made of appointed volunteers and there are currently two vacancies.

She said such a project would be perfect for a student or an Eagle Scout, but she isn’t holding her breath.